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High and dry: how shipping recession has affected abandonments

Nick Roumpis and Michael Angell investigate how the downturn has affected the incidence and impact of seafarer abandonment, and find that a handful of owners and operators are still bringing the industry into disrepute

How does it feel to find yourself onboard a ship, abandoned, unpaid, thousands of kilometres from home, fishing to eat and chopping wood to light a fire?

Cases of seafarer abandonment have not risen to levels seen in the last major downturn, but a spike in the number of incidents reported over the past five months demonstrates that the issue remains a recurring problem and there is still difficulty tracking cases and uneven oversight from flag states.

Measuring the state of seafarer abandonments is also becoming more critical now that maritime insurers are covering the risk.

This year sees the entry into force of Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) rules that require protection and indemnity (P&I) clubs to pay wages and repatriation costs to abandoned crews.

One of the reported cases involved 22 seafarers stuck on the 30,838-dwt Free Neptune (built 1996), owned by Greece’s FreeSeas. Fitter engineer Oleksandr Kornienko spent 14 months on the bulker off the port of Sohar in Oman.

He tells TW+: “The most pessimistic thoughts were about death or starvation or going mad. We also feared serious health issues with our colleagues and our total inability to aid if this happened.”

The crew of the Free Neptune went on a hunger strike last December, Kornienko among them. He describes their attempts to keep themselves busy and forget their misery onboard.

“We looked for any activity to get away from all the problems and thoughts. Our main activity was fishing to diversify our scanty diet and to stretch 10-day food stocks for a month,” he says.

The crew chopped up the ship’s furniture to light fires and learned how to get salt out of seawater.

Communication with the outside world became difficult, but the stranded seafarers found some joy through rare conversations with relatives back home.

Five of last year’s cases were resolved, but 14 remain active. The ILO also has 17 other unresolved cases of abandonment from earlier years.

Yet that number is a vast improvement from the previous shipping downturn. In the immediate wake of the global recession, 64 cases were reported in 2009, affecting 739 seafarers. Since 2010, the number of abandonment cases reported annually to the ILO has ranged between 12 and 18, affecting 1,015 seafarers.

But the ILO says there has been a spike in cases since the beginning of the year. Eleven new cases have been reported, compared with five in the same period in 2016.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the main union representing seafarers globally, reports 90% of the cases listed by the ILO. The federation has stepped up oversight and now employs 140 ship inspectors globally, compared with 30 in the last decade. They conducted 9,500 inspections last year.

But Katie Higginbottom, who heads the ITF’s seafarer abandonment projects, says the ILO’s count may not be a complete picture.

“There could easily be under-reporting,” she says. “There’s nothing to say it’s capturing all that’s out there.”

Higginbottom says inspectors focus on solving cases rather than just reporting them to the ILO. The different maritime agencies involved in abandonment cases can also slow the process.

It took five months after it became public for a case involving 18 seafarers on the 5,887-dwt bitumen tanker Newlead Granadino (built 2009) in Baltimore to be reported to the ILO. The US Coast Guard and the ship’s registry, Transport Malta, had to respond to the original ITF complaint before it was labelled an abandonment.

Despite stepped-up ITF enforcement, it is still difficult to cover all the world’s ports. Seafarers abandoned in Western ports have an easier time reaching authorities than those stranded in developing countries.

In another case, 17 seafarers were left unpaid and unprovisioned on the 28,564-dwt Sea Honest (built 1997) for seven months while it was moored in the Port of Algiers.

Kornienko does not have much praise for the authorities involved in the Free Neptune case. He tells TW+ the crew’s claims and requests were ignored or they were given false promises.

“Probably the most aid we had was that the Liberian state flag administration arranged repatriation for us,” he says.

How abandonment is defined can also yield different measures of the problem. The MLC says a case is triggered when a shipowner fails to cover repatriation costs, does not provide provisions and stores to the ship, or fails to pay wages for at least two months.

Unpaid wages are the most common cases reported to the ITF. Higginbottom says its inspectors reported 1,665 cases of unpaid wages last year involving $35m.

But even whether cases of unpaid wages rise to the level of abandonment can be uncertain, she adds. Some shipowners act in bad faith and withhold wages, but others can have short-term cash flow problems due to charterers not paying their bills or a manning agency failing to disburse wages.

Flag states could aid with oversight, but Higginbottom says registries have a mixed record over abandonment.

Panama-flagged ships are the most commonly reported as being involved in abandonment cases — although that also reflects the overall size of the Panamanian-registered fleet.

However, the Panama Maritime Authority does not have sufficient resources to investigate cases of abandonment. In the case of the Sea Honest, the ITF had to ask the authority to step in to help the seafarers.

Transport Malta has also been singled out as particularly difficult to deal with. The ITF says it had little communication with the registry that flagged the Newlead Granadino during efforts to repatriate its crew.

“The maritime conventions are signed by states,” Higginbottom says. “Responsibility is at the state level.”

Natalie Shaw, director of employment affairs at the International Chamber of Shipping, adds: “Flag states need to intervene earlier with respective stakeholders and if necessary speedily repatriate the crew in line with the provisions of the joint [ILO/International Maritime Organization] guideline procedures. We remain concerned that flag states are not always acting as quickly as they should to expedite resolution of outstanding cases.”

Higginbottom is happy that P&I clubs now have to cover the risk of seafarer abandonment. Even so, there is uncertainty as to how it will work in practice.

The ITF is pushing for owners to post notices in their vessels that seafarers will be covered in cases of abandonment and to provide crew with 24-hour helplines to call.

Yet Higginbottom says a shipowner in trouble might just as likely stop paying premiums to the P&I club, so abandonment coverage may not be available.

She says P&I clubs will now probably be the second point of contact behind the vessel owner, putting more onus on the clubs to work with flag states, as well as the ILO and ITF, to investigate and document cases.

But she also says getting additional resources from the P&I industry will be difficult. Abandonments are still mostly confined to marginal shipowners operating at the fringes of the industry, and are rare among owners of large, well-established commercial fleets.

Nonetheless, Higginbottom says the size of the problem should not disguise the harm to shipping’s reputation and the real impact on those involved.

The industry “may not want to deal with a marginal percentage of vessels when it’s only a handful that bring disrepute”, she says. “Our line is that you can’t allow any part of the industry to create this problem. There should not be any acceptable cases of abandonment. It’s an outrage. It should be a point of principle.”

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High and dry: how shipping recession has affected abandonments

Nick Roumpis and Michael Angell investigate how the downturn has affected the incidence and impact of seafarer abandonment, and find that a handful of owners and operators are still bringing the industry into disrepute

How does it feel to find yourself onboard a ship, abandoned, unpaid, thousands of kilometres from home, fishing to eat and chopping wood to light a fire?

Cases of seafarer abandonment have not risen to levels seen in the last major downturn, but a spike in the number of incidents reported over the past five months demonstrates that the issue remains a recurring problem and there is still difficulty tracking cases and uneven oversight from flag states.

Measuring the state of seafarer abandonments is also becoming more critical now that maritime insurers are covering the risk.

This year sees the entry into force of Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) rules that require protection and indemnity (P&I) clubs to pay wages and repatriation costs to abandoned crews.

One of the reported cases involved 22 seafarers stuck on the 30,838-dwt Free Neptune (built 1996), owned by Greece’s FreeSeas. Fitter engineer Oleksandr Kornienko spent 14 months on the bulker off the port of Sohar in Oman.

He tells TW+: “The most pessimistic thoughts were about death or starvation or going mad. We also feared serious health issues with our colleagues and our total inability to aid if this happened.”

The crew of the Free Neptune went on a hunger strike last December, Kornienko among them. He describes their attempts to keep themselves busy and forget their misery onboard.

“We looked for any activity to get away from all the problems and thoughts. Our main activity was fishing to diversify our scanty diet and to stretch 10-day food stocks for a month,” he says.

The crew chopped up the ship’s furniture to light fires and learned how to get salt out of seawater.

Communication with the outside world became difficult, but the stranded seafarers found some joy through rare conversations with relatives back home.

Five of last year’s cases were resolved, but 14 remain active. The ILO also has 17 other unresolved cases of abandonment from earlier years.

Yet that number is a vast improvement from the previous shipping downturn. In the immediate wake of the global recession, 64 cases were reported in 2009, affecting 739 seafarers. Since 2010, the number of abandonment cases reported annually to the ILO has ranged between 12 and 18, affecting 1,015 seafarers.

But the ILO says there has been a spike in cases since the beginning of the year. Eleven new cases have been reported, compared with five in the same period in 2016.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the main union representing seafarers globally, reports 90% of the cases listed by the ILO. The federation has stepped up oversight and now employs 140 ship inspectors globally, compared with 30 in the last decade. They conducted 9,500 inspections last year.

But Katie Higginbottom, who heads the ITF’s seafarer abandonment projects, says the ILO’s count may not be a complete picture.

“There could easily be under-reporting,” she says. “There’s nothing to say it’s capturing all that’s out there.”

Higginbottom says inspectors focus on solving cases rather than just reporting them to the ILO. The different maritime agencies involved in abandonment cases can also slow the process.

It took five months after it became public for a case involving 18 seafarers on the 5,887-dwt bitumen tanker Newlead Granadino (built 2009) in Baltimore to be reported to the ILO. The US Coast Guard and the ship’s registry, Transport Malta, had to respond to the original ITF complaint before it was labelled an abandonment.

Despite stepped-up ITF enforcement, it is still difficult to cover all the world’s ports. Seafarers abandoned in Western ports have an easier time reaching authorities than those stranded in developing countries.

In another case, 17 seafarers were left unpaid and unprovisioned on the 28,564-dwt Sea Honest (built 1997) for seven months while it was moored in the Port of Algiers.

Kornienko does not have much praise for the authorities involved in the Free Neptune case. He tells TW+ the crew’s claims and requests were ignored or they were given false promises.

“Probably the most aid we had was that the Liberian state flag administration arranged repatriation for us,” he says.

How abandonment is defined can also yield different measures of the problem. The MLC says a case is triggered when a shipowner fails to cover repatriation costs, does not provide provisions and stores to the ship, or fails to pay wages for at least two months.

Unpaid wages are the most common cases reported to the ITF. Higginbottom says its inspectors reported 1,665 cases of unpaid wages last year involving $35m.

But even whether cases of unpaid wages rise to the level of abandonment can be uncertain, she adds. Some shipowners act in bad faith and withhold wages, but others can have short-term cash flow problems due to charterers not paying their bills or a manning agency failing to disburse wages.

Flag states could aid with oversight, but Higginbottom says registries have a mixed record over abandonment.

Panama-flagged ships are the most commonly reported as being involved in abandonment cases — although that also reflects the overall size of the Panamanian-registered fleet.

However, the Panama Maritime Authority does not have sufficient resources to investigate cases of abandonment. In the case of the Sea Honest, the ITF had to ask the authority to step in to help the seafarers.

Transport Malta has also been singled out as particularly difficult to deal with. The ITF says it had little communication with the registry that flagged the Newlead Granadino during efforts to repatriate its crew.

“The maritime conventions are signed by states,” Higginbottom says. “Responsibility is at the state level.”

Natalie Shaw, director of employment affairs at the International Chamber of Shipping, adds: “Flag states need to intervene earlier with respective stakeholders and if necessary speedily repatriate the crew in line with the provisions of the joint [ILO/International Maritime Organization] guideline procedures. We remain concerned that flag states are not always acting as quickly as they should to expedite resolution of outstanding cases.”

Higginbottom is happy that P&I clubs now have to cover the risk of seafarer abandonment. Even so, there is uncertainty as to how it will work in practice.

The ITF is pushing for owners to post notices in their vessels that seafarers will be covered in cases of abandonment and to provide crew with 24-hour helplines to call.

Yet Higginbottom says a shipowner in trouble might just as likely stop paying premiums to the P&I club, so abandonment coverage may not be available.

She says P&I clubs will now probably be the second point of contact behind the vessel owner, putting more onus on the clubs to work with flag states, as well as the ILO and ITF, to investigate and document cases.

But she also says getting additional resources from the P&I industry will be difficult. Abandonments are still mostly confined to marginal shipowners operating at the fringes of the industry, and are rare among owners of large, well-established commercial fleets.

Nonetheless, Higginbottom says the size of the problem should not disguise the harm to shipping’s reputation and the real impact on those involved.

The industry “may not want to deal with a marginal percentage of vessels when it’s only a handful that bring disrepute”, she says. “Our line is that you can’t allow any part of the industry to create this problem. There should not be any acceptable cases of abandonment. It’s an outrage. It should be a point of principle.”